The Pittsburgh Press (October 13, 1944)
Martin charges ‘vote buying’ by Roosevelt
Attacks New Deal’s ‘blundering waste’
Springfield, Massachusetts (UP) –
Pennsylvania Governor Edward Martin today attacked the Roosevelt administration for “flooding the land with promises” and for not having been prepared for World War II.
Mr. Martin said in an address prepared for delivery to the Republican Women’s Club:
The economy promise of 1933 had gone with the wind before the end of that year. Blundering waste and reckless extravagance played their parts in the enormous peacetime debt increase.
When the fourth-term candidate took office in 1933, there were about 550,000 employees on the federal payroll. On Dec. 6, 1941, the eve of Pearl Harbor, the number had risen to more than 1.5 million. Today it is more than three million. Nobody seems to know how many more.
Mr. Martin referred to President Roosevelt’s criticism of the Hoover administration for “piling bureau on bureau, commission on commission,” and then compared the national setup of 1932 with that of today when “there are many more such bureaus and commissions.”
‘Indicts’ Roosevelt
Mr. Martin said:
As a responsible American citizen, I indict Franklin D. Roosevelt for his failure to prepare for World War I for his domestic policies that left us 10 million unemployed, years after the worldwide depression had ended in other nations, and for his attempted packing of the Supreme Court and his political debauchery of that tribunal.
Mr. Martin also accused Mr. Roosevelt of “buying elections by long lists of federal employees trained to snoop into the private affairs of people,” and for “New Deal blunders, quarrels, crackdowns, mistakes and indecisions and for lifting into high places of this nation, men and women of doubtful loyalties.”
Raps ‘swing to left’
The Pennsylvania Chief Executive “indicted” Mr. Roosevelt additionally for the “steady swing of the federal government toward the left and toward the dangerous totalitarianism that has made a shambles of the Old World and has turned back the clock of civilization."
President Roosevelt was accused by Mr. Martin of not heeding U.S. Army and Navy leaders’ “pleas” for increased forces, and added that “there is no military reason why the American people should not be told about what happened” at Pearl Harbor.